This phase is really a process of moving from awareness to commitment, especially among the key managers who must prepare to drive the rest of the organization. The aim here is to convince key people that a great opportunity—or looming problems—lies ahead and that radical thinking around a new paradigm is necessary to make real progress. All the work a company does during this phase—reckoning where it stands competitively on time-based performance, building a vision, and deciding how to proceed—is preparation for the big moves to follow. Some changes in how the company works occur naturally in this phase—good analysis always produces some early obvious action steps. But the real purpose of this phase is to build commitment to a new way of looking at the competitive game and how the managers must play it.

Reckoning where the company stands includes looking hard at its own current performance and direction in relation to what the best companies are doing and what the near future will surely bring. So the process has both an internal and an external analytic component. The internal part involves putting together moving pictures of how the company actually works in time—how it processes information, manages projects, moves materials, engages customers, and so on, and how all this is influenced by the firm’s briefs, practices, policies, and systems. The external part involves describing what customers what now and how they would be served ideally, and pacing together moving pictures of how the best time-based competitors operate. Together these two parts allow management to self-discover in concrete fashion the new time-based paradigm and the capabilities the company must build to gain control of it.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight